Pop Goes the Eagle

I’m quietly thankful nobody has ever made a cocktail whose base flavour is ketchup.

It is my belief that being working class is typified not by dirt under your fingernails but by your willingness to swear at a TV screen. So later that night, I indulge in this part of my heritage across the Monongahela River on Pittsburgh’s South Side, along the row of nightlifey places on East Carson Street. I watch late-night games at offbeat classic Pennsylvania taverns like the White Eagle Inn, with its horseshoe-shaped bar and jukebox full of hip-hop fare, and McArdle’s Pub, with its horseshoe-shaped bar and video bowling. I check out the vast selection of chicken-wing-and-beer-bucket palaces that make life tolerable and, finally, end up settling on the warm, fuzzy feeling emanating from a tiki-hut-themed bar that’s even taken the time to develop a drink inspired by Gilligan’s Island. As I muse there at the bar, I’m quietly thankful nobody has, as far as I know, ever made a cocktail whose base flavour is ketchup.

In the morning, feeling a little less, shall we say, tikitastic, I find myself needing a bigger rush than my coffee is providing. Warhol pops back into mind. “I only eat candy” was one of his more quotable lines, so off I go on a hunt for candy stores – interrupted only by a visit to the impeccable Groovy!, a retro emporium where I buy lunch boxes and board games based on any number of TV series featuring David Hasselhoff. (There are sweets of all kinds in this world.) Candy shops abound in every neighbourhood, in full rainbow-packaged splendour, but the standouts, without a doubt, are the Strip’s Fudgie Wudgie and downtown’s classy Betsy Ann Chocolates, hawking the best peanut-butter cups I’ve ever tasted.

I ride my sugar high all the way to the North Side, to an area of old Victorian homes called the Mexican War Streets. (All its streets are named after battles and leaders of the Mexican-American War.) The Mattress Factory, a defining feature of this increasingly boho neighbourhood, gave up its namesake function to become an art gallery in 1977. It’s one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen. Ambitious installations inundate the space, whose old brick and industrial air lend it a kind of patient, unrushed idiosyncrasy that viewers can quite literally lose themselves in. One installation, where a red light throbbing in the dark demands that I walk blindly toward it, gives me a funhouse scare like I’ve never had at a museum (not even when I saw the prices of Monet umbrellas in the gift shop at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts).

I suspect the truly Warholian response to Pittsburgh would be to avoid the art galleries altogether and instead contemplate the composition of the sign to Loula’s Hot Dog Shop. But, of course, I go to the Andy Warhol Museum, located right by the new field for the city’s almost forgotten baseball team, the Pirates. The four-storey collection of Warhol originals paints a comprehensive history of his work, beginning with his line drawings of shoes and ending with huge silkscreens of Sylvester Stallone. (Yo.) And since the museum takes its place in the pop pantheon seriously, it also puts on non-Warhol shows that tease the idea that popular culture and high culture are actually one and the same, despite someone in a tweed jacket with elbow patches assuring us that a neon sign for Bayer Aspirin is not art. Fortunately for me and all kind-hearted people, the feature exhibition at the time of my visit is a retrospective on the careers and innovations of Ron Popeil and his father, Sam, who gave the world the Chop-O-Matic and the Pocket
Fisherman. Modern geniuses.

In Pittsburgh, people’s true tastes – for candy, Monster sandwiches and football – are indulged.

Pittsburgh is the place where the people’s true tastes – whether for candy, monster sandwiches or football – are unselfconsciously indulged. That alone is unbelievably freeing, when you think about it. And it’s educational. Case in point: Did you know that Poppin’ Fresh, the mascot for Pillsbury, has a girlfriend named Poppie? Thanks to my visits to retro toy stores like Groovy!, I do. Obama may have described western Pennsylvanians as a bunch of bitter clingers, in reference to the region’s conservative core, but the heart of Pittsburgh is anything but bitter. Fun is in the air.

I don’t know if the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra has ever felt compelled to play the Steelers fight song “Goin’ 2 Da Ship,” but I would not bet against it. As a man in Max’s Allegheny Tavern informed me, “In Pittsburgh, the only thing you’re not allowed to say is, ‘It’s only a game!’” The Steelers are a pop-culture phenomenon that goes well beyond the X’s and O’s of the gridiron. After all, the town’s bridges are painted the colour of Steeler pride, and it’s impossible to count the local diners that have parlayed the last name of hero quarterback Ben Roethlisberger into a “Roethlis-Burger.” Football was basically invented in western Pennsylvania, and that primary esthetic – the game as expression of the grit of steelworkers and coal miners – still informs the basic spirit of American football and, for that matter, American culture itself. Seeing a football game in Pittsburgh is like catching a baseball game in Wrigley Field, watching the Habs play in Montreal or falling asleep in a lawn chair in the Daytona 500 parking lot. They go together like fries and ketchup.  

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